CLIP Colloquium: Travis D. Breaux (Carnegie Mellon)

Time:

Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Location:

1146 A.V. Williams Building (AVW)

Title: Policy and Regulatory Semantics for Compliance Assistance

Abstract: Information systems are increasingly pervasive and distributed, allowing these systems to play important new roles in generating, storing and processing sensitive and personal information. Consequently, the responsibility for conforming these systems to laws and regulations falls on software developers, who hold the expertise to design software, but generally lack the necessary awareness of law and regulatory practices. This presents several challenges, because laws are written in specialized, ambiguous language and they encode social norms that are subject to change over time. In this talk, we review emerging methods for extracting logical primitives from laws with the aim of automated reasoning over law and policy across multiple jurisdictions and applications. This includes methods applied to data breach notification laws and privacy policies, where the latter are increasingly used to regulate mobile applications. We will conclude with open challenges, including the challenges of natural language understanding, formal reasoning and bridging the professions of law and engineering as they relate to greater cooperation in automating compliance assistance.

Bio: Travis D. Breaux is an Associate Professor of Computer Science, appointed in the Institute for Software Research of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Breaux's research program searches for new methods and tools for developing correct software specifications and ensuring that software systems conform to those specifications in a transparent, reliable and trustworthy manner. This includes demonstrating compliance with U.S. and international privacy and security laws, policies and standards. Dr. Breaux is the Director of the Requirements Engineering Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Breaux has several publications in ACM and IEEE-sponsored journals and conference proceedings, including best paper nominations and an honorable mention for a 10-year most influential paper award. Dr. Breaux is a member of the ACM SIGSOFT, IEEE Computer Society and USACM Public Policy Committee.